Plus there might be sea serpents (no spoilers here, though!), and links between futuristic whaling and historic practices of ranchers and farmers (with plankton farming as a parallel to wheat farming). Its insistence on causing only the smallest amount of pain and the fewest possible deaths means a collision looms between Buddhist ethics and technologically advanced industrial whaling. It's incredibly humane, and the wardens have a deep respect and even love for their whale charges, but still: it takes a lot of dead whales to generate more than 20% of the protein needed to feed 5 billion people.īuddhism is the only viable religion left, since the others all foundered in one way or another on the rocks of science, which is a problem. In this version of the late 21st century, humans have figured out how to farm the seas to an almost unimaginable extent, with sonic fences allowing for the segregation of whales from their predators (mostly sharks) in order for the human race to get much of its protein intake from whale meat. The time lag on the visiphones, too, means that there's no way to see or talk to them, so they're reduced to writing letters.īut Walt Franklin's engineering talents mean that after some intense psychotherapy, he's able to start a second career with the Bureau of Whales, one of the two major units in the Marine Division.
His wife and sons had been born on Mars, too, so Earth's gravity would crush them, so he divorces his wife and can't see his sons.
Clarke's 1957 The Deep Range, for example, is about a man who'd been a wildly successful space engineer until a serious accident left him with astrophobia so intense that he's not able to return to his wife and sons on Mars, let alone to keep working. I'm going to have to get off the retro science fiction eventually, but it's just so cool! So earnest about environmental crisis, and such manly men (if often embarrassingly girlishly women to match), and such a blend of hope and anxiety.Īrthur C.
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